By Edward Tenner
During this perceptive and provocative examine every thing from software program that calls for swifter processors and extra help employees to antibiotics that breed resistant traces of micro organism, Edward Tenner bargains a digital encyclopedia of what he calls "revenge effects"--the accidental results of the mechanical, chemical, organic, and clinical types of ingenuity which have been hallmarks of the innovative, improvement-obsessed smooth age. Tenner exhibits why our self belief in technological recommendations can be lost, and explores ways that we will higher live to tell the tale in a global the place regardless of technology's advances--and actually because of them--"reality is often gaining on us." For an individual hoping to appreciate the ways that society and expertise engage, Why issues chunk Back is vital reading. "A bracing critique of technological determinism in either its utopian and dystopian forms...No one that desires to imagine in actual fact approximately our high-tech destiny can manage to pay for to disregard this book."--Jackson Lears, Wilson Quarterly
Read or Download Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences PDF
Similar social science books
The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science
Whereas excavating fossils within the tropics of Australia with a star creationist, Will Storr requested himself an easy query. Why don’t proof paintings? Why, that's, did the evidently clever guy beside him truly think in Adam and Eve, the backyard of Eden and a six-thousand-year-old Earth, despite the facts opposed to them?
À l’aube de notre modernité, le romantisme a transformé l. a. littérature, los angeles musique, les Beaux-Arts. Mais, plus généralement, il a bouleversé notre manière de penser, d’aimer, de percevoir l. a. nature ou l’Histoire – en un mot, de vivre.
Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives
As a cultural and political commentator, Stanley Crouch in unapologetically contentious and delightfully iconoclastic. even if he's writing at the specialty of the yankee South, the loss of life of Tupak Shakur, the O. J. Simpson verdict, or the wear and tear performed through the Oklahoma urban bombing, Crouch's high-velocity alternate with American tradition is performed with scrupulous allegiance to the reality, even if it hurts--and it always does.
Arctic Thaw. Climate Change and the Global Race for Energy Resources
Ice within the Arctic is disappearing and chance is asking. As weather switch transforms the head of the area, hotter stipulations are exposing a treasure trove of strength assets formerly trapped in ice. The Arctic's oil, typical fuel, minerals, or even wind and hydroelectric energy have gotten extra available than ever prior to.
- The Caribbean Community (Global Organizations)
- Immigration (Library in a Book)
- Is Shame Necessary?: New Uses for an Old Tool
- Ghost Walls. The Story of a 17th-Century Colonial Homestead
- The Practice of Qualitative Research
- Dressing the Past (Ancient Textile Series, Volume 3)
Extra info for Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
Example text
About 6 percent of all hospital patients are infected by microbes they encounter upon entering the hospital. Medical personnel transmit many of these infections. Some doctors and nurses may be asymptomatic carriers, transmitting bacteria by merely breathing or walking around. But a far simpler problem, inadequate hand-washing, probably causes more complications. A study at the University of Iowa Hospital showed how the pressures of work could displace even this most basic and valuable routine. Investigators studying hand-cleaning preparations found to their dismay that fewer than half of intensive-care personnel—even when aware of the observers—washed their hands at all.
But patients as well as physicians are ready to accept risks; in fact, as the study of Leape and his colleagues showed, the great majority of avoidable medical errors go unnoticed. The real revenge effect is on the practice of medicine itself. We expect technological refinement to reduce dependence on human attention, and it often does. Automobiles and even commercial jet aircraft have fewer gauges to be watched than they did a generation ago. Paved roads actually need less maintenance than dirt ones.
Diabetes is one. As early as 1923, the isolation of insulin made it possible to control a condition affecting millions. The Diabetes Control and Complications Trial, a ten-year American study begun in 1983, showed that tighter control of insulin dosage could reduce eye, kidney, and nerve complications dramatically. But technology once more has brought not a tidy solution but a burden of additional vigilance. Insulin therapy demands constant attention to maintaining proper dosage of the hormone in order to avoid circulation problems that can lead to blindness and amputations.